The emergence of a market-based trading system for greenhouse gases (GHG) (e.g., IPCC 2007), specifically as embodied in atmospheric CO2, presents a technically more demanding and project specific approach relative to studies of the global carbon cycle (Tans et al., 1996; Steffen et al., 1998). Cost-effective, high precision and carbon specific monitoring underpins not only our understanding of the carbon dynamics of the planet (e.g., full carbon budget) but is also the basis of a new and rapidly emerging carbon economy with discrete geographically defined projects representing partial (local and regional) carbon budgets (Capoor and Ambrosi 2007). An accounting of the carbon burden emitted at local, regional, country-wide and global scales is mirrored in regulatory approaches to reduce, avoid and otherwise diminish current sources as well as show negative carbon results through carbon sequestration.
Specifically, the December 1997 Kyoto Protocol specified emissions target and timetables for industrialized nations and market-based measures for meeting those targets (see Anderson, J. W. 1998, The Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change: Resources for the Future) and the need to quantify carbon fluxes was needed to implement the Kyoto Protocol. WO 99/42814 generally describes measurement of isotopes of CO2 in order to determine and monitor global and regional carbon emissions from natural and anthropogenic sources. However, WO 99/42814 only described such systems in broad terms and did not provide any details regarding how specific implementations should be carried out. Notably, even over a decade since the passage of the Kyoto Protocol, no experimental or commercial system currently exists that combines systems for measuring and monitoring both 13C and 14C in one instrument. Particularly, no reliable and geographic-scale system for the direct measurement, monitoring, verification and accounting of carbon for the purposes of carbon trading is available since the introduction of the Kyoto Protocol (1997).